Even if you're not a tech person, at least be aware of this story as it keeps getting bigger. I won't get into technical stuff, just general overview. I'll keep it short and sweet.
I'm posting this here because it's related to a Silicon Valley government-controlled company infringing on the people.
GitHub is the center of the open-source software universe. They're the biggest, and it's not even close. It's where us software developers from all over the world keep code for collaboration with others (I moved my business stuff to GitLab).
It was free, open source love, no license issues and no corporate man gonna' keep us down. You could share code with strangers and nobody caught anything. It was a beautiful time, man.
Then Microsoft came along in 2018 and bought them. To put another way, Microsoft bought most of the software code on the planet in one move. Think about that.
When you write code, it belongs to you, like a piece of music, and you'll protect it with a license, even if it's in a public repository and you intend to share it with the world and let anyone do with it as they please (typically GPL).
You also have private repositories, where you might keep code hidden from the public, like if it's proprietary for a client project, or some secret app, or whatever.
So what does Microsoft do?
They say "Cool, thanks everyone! We're going to go ahead and take all of your code and feed it into our new artificial intelligence product, called Copilot, that helps write code for developers (like autocomplete on crack) who pay for this new service."
What does this mean?
Let's say you spent countless hours of time and money, late nights and many pots of coffee, blood, sweat, and tears working on projects. Now, if someone signs up for Copilot, they can be using YOUR CODE in their projects.
There's many licensing and copyright issues with this, and will continue to heat up as time passes. Just know that if someone is using Copilot and contributes to a project, there may be legal ramifications affecting that project down the road.
My opinion is I don't like it and think it's highly unethical. The only benefit to this is watching leftist software engineers decide they now care about private property rights.
What I REALLY don't like about it that seems to be ignored is this is the CCP doing this, since it's Microsoft. Look for "tech" journalists, none of whom have written a single line of code in their lives, poopoo this and rush to Microsoft's aid.
The CCP now owns all of our code. Lovely.
P.S. Some developers will have issue with me saying Microsoft "owns" the code on GitHub. It's their platform, and they're taking OUR code and training THEIR AI with it. Then THEY sell it and make money from it. We have no say in how they use it, and it's laughable to suggest we can just remove our code from their servers or tell them no. So yes, they own our code.
